Don’t pay EMIs on your car, paste an ad on it

Soon, you may be able to drive home a small car of your choice paying only 25% of the cost of the car as down payment, with no equated monthly installments for 3 years. All you have to do is allow your car to be used as a mobile billboard. HT reports.

autosUpdated: Jul 12, 2013 18:50 IST

HT Correspondent Hindustan Times

Pay-only-25-upfront-and-drive-home-your-dream-car

Soon, you may be able to drive home a small car of your choice paying only 25% of the cost of the car as down payment, with no equated monthly installments for 3 years. All you have to do is allow your car to be used as a mobile billboard for displaying advertisments while you're on the road.

Pune-based media and advertising firm Dreamers media and advertising has launched this scheme. They will pay the installments for your car for the first 3 years on a 5-year term loan, and generate revenues by selling 40-60% of the body shell of the vehicle to display ads.

The scheme is restricted to small cars with on-road cost not exceeding R6 lakh. After 3 years, the vinyl sticker advertisements would be removed, and the customer would have to pay the remaining 2 years’ installments.

The other rider is that in order to ensure that advertisers get the maximum bang for their buck, a car procured under the scheme needs to be driven at least 1,500 kilometres per month, or 50 kilometers a day.

“This is a path breaking innovation in advertising and a win-win for everybody involved,” said Sunis Mohamed, CEO, Dreamers Media and Advertising.

“While it will increase the affordability of the car as the owner need not worry about EMIs for 3 years, the advertisers also get visibility on the road to a much wider target audience.”

To be rolled out in Delhi by September and expanded to all major cities and tier-II towns by the end of the year, the company expects that 15,000 cars would be sold under this scheme this year and swell to 1 lakh the next.

“This will allow a common man to translate his inspiration of buying a car into reality,” Mohamed said. “We are basically looking at the middle income group with annual income less than R10 lakh. Anybody who earns a lakh or more in a month may not be interested in this and we are not targeting them.”

Mohamed also clarified that the car owner would not be liable to pay advertisement tax, as that is applicable to commercial vehicles only.

The scheme will extend also to used cars as well as to customers who have existing loans on their cars or want to leverage their vehicles for extra income.

The company is in talks with various car manufacturers, advertisers, banks and insurance companies and hopes to launch the scheme with 500-750 cars in Delhi by September.